Personal Account of How I Learned About the Shortcomings of Fundraising Outfits:-- Part of a Series, "True Confessions"- How We Learn "Insider Knowledge" About the World

I remember reading years and years ago, in a book published I guess in the 1940's, where someone remarked that there was a phenomenon that they had noticed and had been reaffirmed by other people of their acquaintance: while on a long, long train ride they had made the passing acquaintance of a fellow passenger who found them " simpatico" or something and had "opened up" and told them a long personal story of their life or part of it, much of which was often confessional.

Of course, the situation was such that both people knew they would never see each other again and this was long before our present age of paranoia about revealing things about ourselves ( all the skeletons in our closets that end up in the public domain via Facebook or some media application and are stuck FOREVER in the archives of Google or something). ( Or the young people who put information and photos of themselves or their rants on the internet and don't consider how this could come back to haunt them later, such as when a potential employer might google their name and see something damaging to them).

No, this is more just about those confessional conversations between two people who are never going to see each other again, and I have had a number of them in my Life now.

One of them was particularly revealing about how big organized charities work, in this case the United Way specifically.

I was doing a newsletter for Loews Hotels in New York that was supposedly for employees ( "pot scrubbers" as this Ms. Bontempo, the woman from Loews who worked in internal communications there, described it to me-- except the newsletter really existed only as a forum whereby two senior executives of the Loews Corporation had puff pieces and news about themselves. Bizarre, no? Well, anyway there are a lot of things in the world like this).

MY story here is how as part of writing this newsletter I went to the Loews Ramada Inn on the West Side and sat in on a speech delivered by a pleasant looking young man who spoke to a group of low level employees of the hotel ( mostly Hispanic, it seemed to me) about how they should give money to the United Way.

As part of his slick presentation he also showed a very professionally made little movie about how the United Way did all these wonderful things, etc.

He finished by telling the potscrubbers and chambermaids how they could tithe part of their salaries to the United Way...then took a break when he began to speak to me.

It was as if he just HAD to talk to someone and I seemed sympathetic enough and also in the category of someone he would never see again.

He told me of how guilty he felt pressuring/manipulating these poor workers to part with their money for the United Way, which, he told me, he knew was a charity that spent very little of its income on actual worthy projects and how so much of the money that was gathered went to these bloated salaries for the people who ran the organization.

Worse, these people at the top were part of a world of people with all these "old boy network" connections. They were people who were ALREADY wealthy and now just skimming more money off of a job where they did very little but collected a large sum of money.

The whole situation was eating at this young man and I remember that at the end of his confessional ( after all, he went from hotel to hotel and made the same pitch to all these low level workers)-- he emphasized to me, " It's awful too because these people who make so little to begin with are the most generous in my experience. They pledge a percentage of their salaries to the United Way after being moved by the movie and my presentation."

Looking back, I can see more clearly now why this young man had qualms about how he was making a living...

But this is the sort of thing that happens to people in real life.

I had heard that the United Way was a great charity before ( they spent a lot promoting themselves and as said were well connected with all sorts of highly placed people, often in politics. Some of these politicians would then later take these lucrative easy titular jobs with the United Way).

The whole experience was not really all that shocking to me at the time but it made me think ( and also feel amazed at how I had just been given an insider glimpse into the world of fund raising).

You can go online now and see how different charities are rated by other watchdog groups as to how much money they gather and where this money actually goes.

If you are tempted to make a donation to some apparently worthy cause ( these people are still allowed to call you and make their pitches because they are not "advertisers" per se and thus can contact you even if you are on the "No Call list.")

From what I could see, the Veterans of Foreign Wars seemed to be  a decent charity and I have given money to them. This has put me on their automated mailing list and I get a new appeal all the time, very fancily packaged and with all sorts of mailing labels and key rings and other paraphenalia, all the time. Makes you wonder.

You have probably had the same kind of experience I have had with having someone by chance reveal to you something of the inner workings of our society that you really did not know about before. I am going to ask my friends to give me THEIR stories of situations like this and print them here on the blog.

By the way, writing this has brought back memories of OTHER interesting encounters I have had, one of them as funny as this one was sad-- the funny one being a discourse by a cop from Jersey City whom I met in a bar once who told me all these hilarious  stories about the inner workings of police and local politicians in Jersey City. The cop, whom I will call Aloysius O'Neill, was one of those gregarious upbeat people who could find the humor or the irony in just about anything. I found out later that he was well known to the people who ran the bar and very well liked by them and his fellow police officers, most of whom were NYPD.  ( The Chief of the Jersey City Police Dept would go drinking in Manhattan and there would be messages on police radios, Uh-oh, You Know Who is back in town --they would be ready to deal with any mayhem he caused with discretion and kid gloves. But more of this another time).

--LK